Ubuntu for Phones Activated on 10,000 Devices

It turns out that the new Ubuntu is much more popular than previously anticipated

Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu for phones operating system has been activated on 10,000 devices, marking an important milestone for the company.

Ubuntu for phones was announced at the beginning of 2013 and the development team has been working on it since then. It took them a while to get a functioning version and they've been improving it constantly.

This new 10,000-device milestone is important because the company doesn't have handsets shipping with the operating system. So far, only users with Nexus devices – phones and tablets – have been able to install it. This means a lot for an OS that you can only download.

“Ubuntu phone (and tablet) users sign into their Ubuntu One account on their device in order to download or update the applications on their phone. This allows us to provide many useful features that users expect coming from Android or iOS, such as being able to re-install their collection of apps on a new phone or after resetting their current one, or browsing the store’s website (coming soon) and having the option to install an app directly to their device from there.”

“As a side effect, it means we know how many unique Ubuntu One accounts have connected to the store to in order to download an app, and that number has this week passed the 10,000 mark,” said Canonical’s Michal Hall.

Currently, users don’t have to delete Android from their Nexus devices because it’s possible to dual boot, and there are even a few ways to do it. The first devices to ship with Ubuntu preinstalled will arrive later this year, most likely before the holiday season, and the community’s interest is already at an all-high level.

Canonical also created an Ubuntu SDK to help developers make apps for the new operating system and there already are quite a few native apps that rival the ones on other platforms. The devs are not there yet, but they still have a few months until the official release and there is still plenty of time get a decent amount of applications and not just some web app replacements.

If you have a Nexus 4 phone or a Nexus 7 tablet, you can install Ubuntu right now. It’s still rough around the edges and you might find it a little too different from what you were used to, but give it time and you will grow to like it.